Is a ceasefire deal to stop Israel’s Rafah offensive still possible?

Cairo urged Israel this afternoon to refrain from any action that would jeopardise “strenuous efforts made to reach a sustainable truce,” after IDF tanks rolled into the southern Gaza Strip today, seizing control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt, 1.8 miles from Israel’s border.

A moment of hope that the seven month long war in Gaza might finally be coming to an end – after Hamas announced it had accepted a three-phase ceasefire proposal yesterday evening – turned out to be short-lived. 

Within hours of the Hamas leadership making the surprise announcement, Netanyahu had rejected the deal. According to the Israeli PM, the proposal – drafted by Egyptian mediators and formulated alongside the US – is “far from meeting” Israel’s “core demands”.

Now, the prospect of an impending military offensive in Rafah looms once again. Overnight, the IDF launched further strikes on the city, in which it claims to have killed 20 Hamas fighters. Palestinians have been fleeing the eastern part of Rafah today after Israel ordered around 100,000 civilians to evacuate to Khan Younis and al-Mawasi ahead of its military operation. 

But might there still be time to reach a deal to prevent a full offensive of Rafah from going ahead? 

While Netanyahu was quick to reject the deal currently on the table, he has sent an Israeli delegation to Cairo today to see if it can negotiate some “new answers”. And Hamas officials are also heading for the Egyptian capital.

Israel wasn’t directly involved in the truce talks in Cairo prior to this and Israeli officials have made it known that they were caught off guard yesterday by Hamas’s acceptance of the latest proposal.

Neither Hamas nor the mediators have disclosed the full details of this proposal – including, crucially, what it says about the prospect of a permanent cessation of military operations in Gaza. 

However, an Israeli official revealed today that there are several aspects of the document that Tel Aviv objects to, including the fact that, if 33 living hostages cannot be found for the first phase of deal, then bodies can be substituted instead, and the fact that the deal would oblige Israel to release an agreed number of prisoners from a list that Hamas will provide, with no power of veto for any individual case. 

The fact that the Israeli delegation arriving in Cairo only consists of mid-level envoys – and doesn’t include senior officials from the intelligence services Mossad and Shin Bet – suggests that Israel isn’t expecting these new negotiations to lead to a breakthrough.

Another big question is what exactly Washington makes of the deal currently on the table. 

“Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel,” said US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, speaking from Cairo last week, as he urged the group to accept the latest ceasefire deal, drawn up by Egyptian mediators. CIA chief William Burns was reportedly also in Cairo for last week’s talks, before heading to Doha to put pressure on the Hamas political leadership to accept the terms, via Qatari mediators there. 

We cannot be sure that the proposal accepted by Hamas last night was the exact same “generous” proposal mentioned by Blinken last week, since we don’t have details of the contents from either party. Even so, US diplomatic activity in Cairo last week provides a strong indication that it would have hailed yesterday evening’s announcement from Hamas as major progress. 

Which begs the question, what does Washington make of Netanyahu’s swift rejection of the proposal? And will it pile pressure on Israel to accept a deal in the coming days? So far, the White House has been very cautious and avoided directly addressing Monday’s announcement from the Hamas leadership. The only decisive statement it has made since is that it continues to oppose any large-scale military operation in Rafah. 

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